How to play old games on your computer: Installing MESS and MESS GUI

Lets keep this short and sweet. MESS (Multi Emulator Super System) has the ability to emulate TONS of systems. The first time you boot it up after this tutorial, you’ll see what I mean. The list is ridiculously long. I’m not going to cover how to get each system running in this article. This article serves as a reference point on how to get MESS installed and how to give it a pretty interface so you don’t have to do everything by the command line.

First, you’re going to have to download MESS and install it. You can get the files here. Once you have the files, installing is very easy. All you have to do is unzip it and move it.

Your download will be called something like MESS0147b.zip. This means when you unzip it, the resulting folder will have that same name (minus the .zip). Rename it to “mess” and cut/paste it into a folder on your c: drive called “emulators”. If you don’t have this folder, create it. All of my tutorials assume your emulators reside in this folder.

At this point, MESS is installed. You could technically begin using it at this point, but as a command line tool only. I prefer to have a nice interface. To do this we’ll be installing MESSUI

MessUI takes us from this:

to this:

To install MESS UI, you have to go download it. You’ll be presented with a file that is something like ps_Unmessuixxx. rar. To decompress this file, you’ll need a program for opening .rar files. I use Win-Rar.

Once you decompress this file, you’ll find several items. The one you’re interested in, is called MESSUI. You’ll need to decompress that one too. Once you’ve decompressed it, you’ll find a folder called MESSUI. Inside that folder is a single item, again called MESSUI. This needs to be copied to your c: drive. Specifically, into your folder for mess, located inside c:\emulators.

Once that is done, double clicking on MESSUI should get you the pretty interface you see above.